A01=Paola De Santo
ambassador
archival research
Author_Paola De Santo
body politic
Category=DS
Category=DSBC
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHD
Category=NHDL
comparative analysis
corporeality
courtesan
cultural identity
diplomatic history
early modern diplomacy
early modern Italy
early modern period
early modern studies
early modern women
early modern women writers
elite society
embodiment and politics
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
female agency
formation of the individual
gender and power
gendered spaces
intersection of gender and politics.
Italian literature
Italian statecraft
legal texts
literary discourse
metaphor of the body politic
modern subjectivity
narrative identity
Paola De Santo
political bodies
Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy
political discourse
political identity
political messengers
political roles
political writing
power dynamics
Renaissance culture
Renaissance Italy
Renaissance women writers
ridotto
sexuality and politics
state formation
Tasso's poetry
the ambassador
The Ambassador and the Courtesan
the courtesan
The Early Modern Exchange
Torquato Tasso
urban salon
utopia and politics
Veronica Franco
women writers
Product details
- ISBN 9781644534151
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: University of Delaware Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this book demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic, including the relationship of their very bodies to that metaphorical body. One imagines the early modern ambassador as traveling from one center of power to another, gathering news and disseminating it in writing, as well as negotiating in person. The courtesan, in contrast, is normally imagined employing her body in the service of entertaining elite clients in the enclosed space of the urban salon. These characterizations reinforce their very different roles in Renaissance Italian society and culture, but by placing them in dialogue, salient points of convergence emerge detailing how they were integral to the concurrent emergence of a modern subjectivity of the individual and the formation of the modern state.
Paola de Santo is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia in Athens. De Santo’s research focuses on early modern Italy, with a particular interest in women writers. Together with Caterina Mongiat Farina, she is editor and translator of Isabella Andreini’s Letters (1607) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series, and editor of an Italian-language critical edition of Andreini’s Lettere.
